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The General Staff Black Powder Map Editor
Map Editor Overview The General Staff Black Powder Map Editor (hence referred to as the Map Editor) allows you to create new battlefield maps for use with the General Staff Black Powder Wargaming System. In many ways the Map Editor is a traditional multi-layered paint program with similar functionality as popular paint programs like PhotoShop, In the above schematic image we see that there are five possible layers in a General Staff battlefield map: Place Names & Victory Points '(optional), '''Foreground Image '(optional), '''Terrain, Elevation and Background Image (optional). After a map is created and saved in the Map Editor it can be loaded into the General Staff Black Powder Scenario Editor and used to create new or historical battles that are then played in the General Staff Black Powder Simulator. '' 'Digitizing Tablets & Pens' The ''Map Editor ''supports the use of digitizing tablets and pens as well as the standard two button + scroll button mouse. '''The Map Editor Screen' Upon running the Map Editor your screen will look like this: The screen is divided into two areas: the Tool Pane on the left hand side of the screen and the Drawing Canvas which takes up most of the screen. Above these two sections are a standard Menu Bar. '''The grid lines and the Compass Rose are optional and can be toggled on/off from the '''Layers menu. The Tool Pane Drawing tools, tool options and map information is entered in the Tool Pane area on the left portion of the screen. Clicking on the left or right arrows on either side of the tab title will scroll to the previous / next tab (see above image). The Map Options Tab The Map Options Tab is where you enter information about the map itself. There are three options: Map Name The Map Name is, obviously, the name of the map. A descriptive name, like Sharpsburg, September 17, 1862 would be appropriate. Map Description Enter a descriptive text about the map. This information is saved with the map. Map DPI You can select the DPI (Dots Per Inch) resolution that the map will be saved at (either 96, 300, 600, 1200 or 2400). Remember: the greater the DPI the larger the file size! You may wish to save the map at higher DPI resolution if you intend to print out the map (very handy for board gamers) or if you have a high resolution monitor. The Drawing Options Tab These are the tools that you will be using to draw on the Drawing Canvas portion of the screen. When you choose to work with one of the Area or Line tools on the... Drawing Options Tab your map cursor will change to a pen: The Drawing Options Tab is divided into three sections: Area Drawing Tools Area Drawing Tools are tools for drawing filled in areas on the map like Forests, Lakes and Swamps. When you draw on the Drawing Canvas with an Area Drawing Tool your start and end points are automatically connected and the enclosed area is filled in with the selected terrain type. If you are using a mouse to draw the start point is where you click down with the left mouse button. Hold the left mouse button down until you have arrived at your end point and then release the left mouse button. The start and end points are automatically connected. If you are using a digitizing table and pen press down on the tablet with the pen at the start point, continue drawing with the pen until you reach the end point and then lift the pen off of the drawing tablet. The start and end points are automatically connected. After selecting a drawing tool a rosette will appear in the button to indicate that this drawing tool has been selected: 'Forest Drawing Tool' An example of using the Forest Drawing Tool. Note the quill pen indicates time remaining; Obtain Elevation Data ( Preliminary write up ). This tab uses data from Google Maps. In order to use this (optional) functionality you will need to create a Google Maps Platform account. The relationship for this service is of course between you and Google. The details of this have been subject to recent change, but are explained: https://cloud.google.com/maps-platform/ Although you register a credit card, the service is effectively free for normal usage since you get $200 "credit" each month. If you want to create many maps using this service then use Google's pages to check usage. Current costing is $5 per 1,000 calls. A map's worth of data is 579 calls. You will be given a unique id which is necessary to call the service. Once you have registered and have this long string of characters and numbers, create a txt file ( notepad ) called googlekey in: %localappdata%/generalstaff The reason this is a manual process external to GeneralStaff is to ensure you understand this is not part of our code you will be using. Google's Elevation API is by far the most convenient source of real world elevation data but rather quirky. Presumably due to past abuses the service was sensitive to the high number of calls necessary for our purposes. Until recently it was taking two runs to obtain a full map's worth of data. If the download stops mid run, save your map and try again several hours later to obtain the rest. If you try immediately and the failure was because Google decided you were asking for too much data, it will always fail. On the plus side the recent change to force registration seems to have allowed them to remove or reduce the sensitivity of the usage checks. Elevation Data Alternatives You might think that Google's elevation api is a bit of a nuisance what with the registering and sensitivity. Which it is. So why on earth are we using it? That's because it works reasonably predictably, offers effectively 100% coverage and is easy to use. The alternatives fail on most or all of these. Starting what would be a project of itself dedicated to downloading, translating and providing elevation data would take substantial effort. The necessary hosting would probably also necessitate passing charges on to you the user.